Get the newsletter

Cooking for four omnivores and a vegetarian the other night, I made an awesome beef-and-vegetable soup to start, a real labor of love of which I was quite proud. Needless to say this was not going to make the vegetarian happy.

So I decided to give her a preview of a vegetable course, in part because I have a refrigerator drawer full of these still-firm and –flavorful Glynwood carrots and in part because I realize I never roast carrots whole, but almost always as part of a (now somewhat boring and clichéd) roast vegetable mix.

It was pretty simple, of course. I took a big lump of butter and put it in the pan on the stove while I heated the oven to 400°. I trimmed the carrots but didn’t peel them; rather I scrubbed them with a brush – peeling seemed overkill. Then I rolled them in the melted butter and put the pan in the oven.

They took 45 minutes or so, but I held them at a lower temperature for a while. All I did was shake the pan now and then so they browned evenly – and at some point threw some salt in there. It could not have been much easier; biggest mistake was not making enough, because they were devoured quickly.

This past weekend I took a cooking class at the Queens home of Dolly, who is an instructor with League of Kitchens, a New York City-based organization that connects accomplished immigrant home cooks with anyone interested in learning about other cuisines and cultures.

I had wanted to take a class for years, but, as often happens with me, somehow never got my act together. (They fill up fast, life gets in the way, etc.) That finally changed this past weekend, when I was paid back for a favor done in the form of a cooking class. A few weeks ago, my friend and I compared calendars, and I crossed-referenced menus. The classes are very vegetarian friendly, but I wanted to make up for seven years of not eating meat. So curry goat and roti it was. Continue reading →

I’ve always been a big fan of rack of lamb, leg of lamb, lamb chops. Roasted or pan-seared lamb is just one of the best things ever. But it’s only been in the last year that I discovered lamb burgers. Part of that has been due to the fact that my local food store, Adams Fairacre Farms, has been sourcing its lamb from the Hudson Valley (Josef Meiller Farm in Pine Plains). Before that, the only ground lamb I ever saw in supermarkets was an unsettling light pink and looked like it had been put through an angel-hair pasta extruder. The lamb I get at Adams is freshly ground by their butchers each day. And the burgers? Forget beef burgers of any ilk—my favorite burger now, hands down, is made from lamb. Continue reading →

My husband, Sean Santoro, and I make a big deal out of Sunday brunch together. Only we never eat the same thing. I recycle vegetables, soup, or salad from the night before as a base for poached eggs. (Mark’s recipe is unfussy and un-vinegary.) And Sean always makes himself bacon and something—an omelet or other eggy thing cooked in the pan drippings—and fruit, which I save for an afternoon snack, what with all the roughage going on already. Continue reading →

The best cooking tip I’ve been lucky enough to ever receive came from a pastry chef, who has been a nearly life-long vegetarian. Strangely, this technique involves meat and not dessert.

I was eating dinner at her home, which included the most delicious roasted vegetables; I asked how she does it. Her elegant answer: “I’ve never understood why people don’t treat vegetables like meat.” After prodding for elaboration, I got the secret: get your pan screaming hot before adding anything to it. Continue reading →

My partner Kathleen and I made lasagne (each sheet is a “lasagna”; lasagne is plural), the other night. I never thought it was the kind of thing you needed much of a recipe for, unless you were making a fancy, sort of béchamel-and-mushroom kind of thing. But a) we’d been making fresh pasta with some regularity and b) we had some ricotta and some potential mozzarella from Caputo Brothers. (Which might consider changing its name to Caputo “Family” given that the family member on their videos is Rynn Caputo, a woman.)

Anyway. Kat is a lasagne expert, I think it’s a pretty easy thing, a friend’s dog had died (actually two friends’ dogs had died in the same day, but to one I sent flowers because she’s too far away for a lasagne), we had these cheese curds and some local (Glynwood, in fact) spinach, tomatoes, beef, and eggs, and some really good flour from Community Grains and Wild Hive, both, so on a lark we decided to make the best possible lasagne. Continue reading →

I have been wanting to try this forever, and even got so far as to buy a bag of shelled edamame and throwing it in the freezer, where it has stayed for the last month or so. I finally got my break yesterday, and making them couldn’t have been easier.

I used a ten-ounce bag, just about 2 cups of beans. Defrost—the best way is to just run them under water then pat dry. Spill them onto a rimmed baking sheet and put them into a 400° oven until they start to get a bit crunchy/chewy and start to brown, which will take about 30 minutes. (If you want to get them really crunchy, dial the heat down to 350° or even 325°. At these lower temps, you can get the edamame drier before they get too brown. Check on them every 10 to 15 minutes after the first half hour—it might take up to an hour to get them to the degree of crispness you want, depending on the temperature you use). Continue reading →

A few weeks ago I had fun making tortillas with Mark. Inspired—and armed with a bag of local coarse-ground masa harina from Sacred Sun Cooperative Farm in Kansas—I immediately invested in a tortilla press. And then boom, right on cue Sarah Curry asked question on Instagram about avoiding lard in tortillas. (Add your own questions and see more responses with #askbitt.)

This month I’ve now concocted tortillas three ways: with lard, with no fat, and with a good-quality liquid sunflower oil. And I’m happy to report all work fine, though the ones without fat were less pliable, more crumbly, less chewy. So the answer is yes: You can replace the lard with another fat—or nothing at all. Continue reading →

“I love the flavor that browned butter gives to…well, nearly everything. Since butter also has a functional purpose in recipes, I wonder about using it in baked goods. Does butter lose its shortening power once browned? Ought one substitute it only for a portion of a recipe’s butter or is it possible to substitute browned butter for all the unbrowned? Does browned butter solidify sufficiently to use in recipes requiring solid butter?”

You’d think butter couldn’t be improved upon, until you discover brown butter: It’s nutty, it’s toasty, and it makes anything taste better. So why not bake with it? No good reason: If you have a recipe that doesn’t include it, but one you think would be improved (or just nicely varied) with those deeper flavors, there are a few things to keep in mind. Continue reading →

When you’re buying fish in a strange place, it helps if both you and the person you’re buying it from know all about marine taxonomy, including the Latin for everything. Since this is almost never the case, you can run into the kind of situation I was in last week in Dominica, where I was told what was pretty clearly some kind of jack was a salmon. When I said, “That’s not what they call a salmon in the rest of the world,” another fishmonger intervened and said it was in fact a blue runner. When I later looked online at pictures of blue runners, I found that indeed they are a kind of jack, but not the jack that I’d bought and had filleted.

As they say: Whatever. It’s a fish. With an unreliable grill and novel fuel—a kind of wood that burned slowly but not especially hot—I thought the fish needed some protection, some kind of en papillote situation, or it was going to stick to the grill grates like it had been superglued. I thought about this while slow-grilling some beautiful garlic, green onions, and “seasoning chiles,” which look like habaneros but are mild enough to eat, almost like padróns. I had no foil, so that was out. I had no parchment paper, which is what we think of as the “real” en papillote wrapper, though I wasn’t certain that would work anyway. Continue reading →